Jeff Poor

On Mark Levin’s Monday night radio show, Michael Reagan, the adopted son of Ronald Reagan, defended Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich against accusations that he was not a part of the Reagan Revolution.

“I really just got tired of the attacks against Newt, like Newt really didn’t serve in the Congress of the United States when my father came in there in the 1980s and gave us the tax cuts and changed the way we were doing business and created jobs and what have you,” Reagan said. “Newt was in fact there, and I remember Newt from those days. But I also remember Newt from the 1990s, when all of us in the Republican Party were just championing Newt because he put together ‘Contract with America,’ the fact we took back Congress for the first time in 40 years — all these things that, in fact, he was doing. And the work he’s done for the Republican Party since, helping elect Republicans to office and he’s done nothing but really uphold my father’s legacy for so many years.”

Michael Reagan, who has been campaigning for Gingrich, said he wondered if Ronald Reagan himself would pass muster with some of these who have attacked Gingrich as a “Reagan conservative.”

“I wonder if these people today would think Reagan was a Reagan conservative,” he said.

Since Gingrich has ascended in the polls and used the name of “Ronald Reagan” to bat down attacks at his conservative credentials, some have come out in opposition to Gingrich’s use of Reagan on the stump.

Elliott Abrams , who served during all eight years of Reagan’s two terms, disputed Gingrich’s claim that he was a part of Reagan’s effort to defeat the Soviet empire. And Pat Buchanan, who served as the White House communications director under Reagan, questioned some of the Gingrich’s “opportunistic” attacks while a member of the House under Reagan.

Levin, who served in the Reagan administration, said he didn’t remember any of what Gingrich’s naysayers were talking about when it came to Reagan.

“If it happened, it was probably at the gossip level and so forth,” he said. “But it wasn’t much more than that. I can tell you in the Reagan administration that I served in, Newt Gingrich wasn’t somebody we were worried about. You know, we had other problems to worry about on Capitol Hill, but he wasn’t one of them.”